First of all, I disagree. The future will be cool, at least in the long term. What it won't be is weird, in the sense of people wearing spacesuits in their living rooms. The bizarre visions people have traditionally had of the future (and which, demonstrably, haven't come true) seemed to focus largely on superficial stuff (clothing fashions, which are highly unpredictable but have a long-term mean-reversion) and to exaggerate. That doesn't mean that the world hasn't changed, and won't change, in profound ways.
Yes, the pleasures of life (wine, music, books, sex, spiritual experience) don't change all that much and therefore we use a lot of old technologies in daily life, so it can appear like there's nothing new... but there will be more people able to afford them, and they will be much less impeded by the stupid shit that clogged up peoples' lives in pre-technological times. Just to continue Taleb's example: in the 21st century, a lot of people get to drink wine of (by historical standards) exceedingly high quality. Three millennia ago, wine existed but the vast majority of people never got to drink any.
Many of the modern applications that have managed to survive today came to disrupt the deleterious effect of the philistinism of modernity, particularly the 20th century: the large multinational bureaucratic corporation with “empty suits” at the top; the isolated family (nuclear) in a one-way relationship with the television set, even more isolated thanks to car-designed suburban society [...]
I'm going to stop there with the quote. His point is valid, but I think there's something missed when people rip on suburbia. Yes, it's outmoded and wasteful and somewhat ugly, but the Levittowns were a lot better than the "company towns" of early-industrial hell, and those were a lot better than being a serf on a medieval enclosure, in a time when it wasn't uncommon for a peasant to have his head cut off by a knight (knights were more like warlords than the noble paladins of romance). People tend to compare the experiences of average people now against those of an elite in the past and conclude that things were better, but that's not fair. The 1800-era analogue of a bored suburbanite of 50th-percentile social status (only one car!) was not an English baron, but someone who started work at seven in the coal mines.
People rip on suburbia now because it's outmoded, but it wasn't always this way. Urban freeways are called "parkways" because the vision of Robert Moses (in hindsight we say, "That fucker!", but he was very respected in his time) was for them to be park-like roads for an automotive elite. In the 1920s, suburbia was very much in. The suburban lifestyle, with lots of driving, was designed for the rich and handed down, over a couple of decades, to the working classes in a watered-down form. The result now, almost a century later, is that "suburbia" is no longer cool because the low-quality suburbs of the poor have killed the image of the concept.
Oddly enough, has anyone ever noticed how rich people suburbs aren't called that? The Hamptons isn't "suburbia". The Woodbury towns out there are "charming little towns" rather than suburbs, because the rich people who live there have enough time to make zoning rules that keep a quaint little street or two alive. These people aren't morally superior for having houses in high-price towns that still have walkable main streets as opposed to "suburbs". They're just richer.
One thing I find interesting is that Ted Kaczynski (Unabomber) wrote an essay about technology and alienation, while most of his complaints were of the industrial-era society, not the technological society we evolved into. He was miserable because, in spite of his extreme intelligence and adept writing, he had no real influence in a world run by corrupt corporate institutions. So he went out and killed people in order to effectively force the New York Times to publish his rant. If he had waited 15 years and not killed people, he would have had the public access and attention he craved. He might have trolled a bit, but no one would have died. Technology was just about to solve many of the problems that had him so upset-- that he blamed on industrial society.
My view of technology and progress is that it's nearly monotonic in "goodness", but that the old humanity we're now trying to distance ourselves from is quite tenacious and willing to use technology toward pre-technological purposes, and so the long-term convergence toward democracy that we'd like to see doesn't come nearly as fast as we'd like. For example, one might like to believe that, in an electronic world, old-style industrial pressures like taking orders from managers, showing up in an uninspiring white-box office during certain hours, and writing TPS reports would vanish... but human nature is a certain way and power likes to maintain position, so the transition is actually taking decades rather than the hours that it "should". The result of this is that the technological push toward a better world appears to collapse into an unsatisfying half measure and people end up having to use technology in uninspiring ways (e.g. getting to write code, but still having to take orders from non-technical executives or "product managers"). That's not technology's fault. That's an artifact of humans being slow to improve themselves.
> My view of technology and progress is that it's nearly monotonic in "goodness"...
I think this is pretty naive or at the least, a simplistic way of viewing technology. In the early 20th century, people in the US were using rational ideas to promote terribly racist and oppressive social practices. Suburbs and urban policy may have been an improvement for some, but they also greatly contributed to the death of urban cores, which lead to decades of poverty for the people who couldn't get out of those areas. The two world wars demonstrated how technology can be used for incredible death and destruction. Technology now is enabling global competition that puts a great deal of strain on the blue collar middle class in developed nations who used to have manufacturing jobs, meanwhile other countries get rich using their low wages and lack of labor and workplace safety standards to be more competitive.
Don't get me wrong, I am not a luddite. I think it's fine to say that over the longer term, technology improves things. It's possible the people who lost their manufacturing jobs can eventually get higher-skilled jobs that allow them (and our society) to produce more advanced goods, and the people overseas will eventually be able to demand higher standards. People are noticing that living in an urban area has a lot of advantages over suburbs, and cities are springing back to life. But to gloss over the bad periods in between by saying that technology is monotically good is simply not an accurate viewpoint.
I'd say goodness lies in how we use our technology and that in the balance it's hard to say. We have 7 billion people on the planet now compared to 1 billion in 1800. In addition to natural population biology, this growth has been influenced greatly by advances in medicine and agriculture. Yet today over 1 billion people live in extreme poverty, and only 1 billion people live in a so-called first-world country or at that approximate standard of living. I'm not sure if there was anybody living in extreme poverty in 1800.
If we could quantify an individual's suffering, then we could look at two metrics: the sum of all suffering on the planet, and the average individual suffering on the planet. While I would probably agree that for 1st-world countries these numbers have gone down, I'm just not sure if the same can be said for the global population. It's also unclear whether technology was just ineffective here or actually contributed to the problem.
Even as far as our current dreams of technotopia are concerned, it's important not to forget just how dependent they are on people working and living in what many of us consider abhorrent conditions.
If our use of technology made it so that every human on the planet had to do less work overall then I might be convinced that it was "good" as opposed to "hard to say", but it seems like we want ourselves to do as much if not more work with each new advance, as if work and production of stuff is the ultimate measure of our lives.
I'm not sure if there was anybody living in extreme poverty in 1800.
You have got to be kidding. What we call "extreme poverty" today would have seemed like luxury to almost every human being who has ever lived. The difference today is not that there are a billion people who live in extreme poverty; it's that there are a billion who are living at a first world standard of living. That is a far higher fraction of humanity than ever before; I would be surprised if even a small fraction of a percent of all of humanity in 1800 lived at what would then have been considered a "first world" standard of living. (Not to mention that what qualifies as a first world standard of living today has, in many respects, never existed before--what qualified as "first world" in 1800 would, in many respects, be considered "extreme poverty" today.)
When I say "extreme poverty" I am referring mostly to modern conditions in sub-Saharan Africa. I was under the impression that hardly anyone lived in such conditions in 1800. Of course I am aware that there were plagues and famines and caste systems and so on, but I would be surprised to learn that 1/7 of the population lived the way that 1/7 of the population lives now, basically without enough food or water as a part of daily life. Wikipedia says, "In 1820, the average European worker earned about three times what the average African did. Now, the average European earns twenty times what the average African does."
I was under the impression that hardly anyone lived in such conditions in 1800.
How do you think people lived in sub-Saharan Africa in 1800? Living at bare subsistence level is exactly how almost all humans who have ever lived, lived.
Wikipedia says, "In 1820, the average European worker earned about three times what the average African did. Now, the average European earns twenty times what the average African does."
That's not because Africa has gotten poorer. It's because Europe (and America) have gotten enormously richer through huge increases in productivity. As in, now 1/7 of humanity gets to live in "first world" conditions, in--wait for it--Europe and America.
My understanding is that whereas (sub-Saharan) African people by and large used to be farmers and were generally able to grow enough food, drink enough water, build adequate shelter, and make enough clothes, that since colonization (which got going in earnest in 1880) the continent was basically shoehorned into modern industrial society and that now many Africans are dependent on whatever foreign aid they can get and are no longer self-sufficient.
What I'm saying is that if you went to Africa in 1800 I don't believe you would see today's stereotypical child in rags with ribs sticking out of his chest and a swollen belly, but again, if you have a reference that says colonization (or its later rejection) did nothing to change poverty in Africa it would be interesting to read it.
since colonization (which got going in earnest in 1880) the continent was basically shoehorned into modern industrial society and that now many Africans are dependent on whatever foreign aid they can get and are no longer self-sufficient
The lack of self-sufficiency in Africa, where it exists, is not a product of colonialism; it's a product of post-colonialism. It's not politically correct to say so these days, but you can see from the Wikipedia page that yummyfajitas referenced that Africa's GDP was basically constant until 1820, then grew at an increasing rate up until 1973, and is now tapering again. I.e., it grew fastest under colonialism. What stopped the growth was that when colonialism was stopped, nothing workable was put in its place; instead Africa was handed over to corrupt dictators who had no ability to or interest in governing properly.
If we're going to measure things in GDP, I believe that the disparity matters more than the hard numbers, which is why I pointed out that the former ratio of 1:3 is now 1:20.
There's another factor too: if you just have a plot of land that is able to provide food, water, clothing, and shelter for yourself without any actual registered trade you actually contribute nothing to the GDP. My understanding is that this self-sufficiency was basically destroyed by colonists.
If GDP has grown, which means the sub-continent is largely more productive now in capitalist terms, and therefore self-sufficiency levels have not changed but rather increased, why is it so dependent on foreign aid when it wasn't - as far as I am aware - in 1800?
Also, while post-colonialism obviously left the place in ruins, I think it's quite clear that you can't have post-colonialism without colonialism.
I guess at the end of the day I don't consider poverty to be measured in dollars and cents but in actual day-to-day quality of life, and I have a hard time believing that for the percentage of the population living in "extreme poverty" (less than $1.25 per day - note that dollars and cents matter more when you don't have other ways to provide for yourself), things were as bad when they had their own land and were self-sufficient. Unless you have something that clearly says, "No, life there has always been hell." It's not that I'm unwilling to believe something different, it's just that I want to hear it from someone who really knows about the history of how people lived at the time.
Africa continues to have pockets of what you call "self-sufficiency" (and what the rest of the world calls "subsistence farming").
You might be surprised to discover that people don't actually like "self sufficiency" very much. In fact, they attempt to escape it as fast as they can, typically by migrating from rural areas to urban slums. Strangely, Africans enjoy capitalist luxuries like mobile phones and antibiotics just as much as westerners do.
Africa is "dependent" on foreign aid simply because they nowadays their population desires colonial luxuries like education and running water, whereas before colonialism they didn't know such things existed.
Africa is "dependent" on foreign aid simply because they nowadays their population desires colonial luxuries like education and running water, whereas before colonialism they didn't know such things existed.
I think there's a bit more to it than that. If African countries were governed competently, they would need much less foreign aid in order to have education and running water and mobile phones and antibiotics and so on. The reason they aren't governed competently is, as I said before, that the people who got rid of colonialism didn't put anything else working in its place.
You know, it's just so hard to argue with people who are being condescending. Your post here is just dripping with superiority, whereas I've done my utmost to stay polite. Even if I believe that my point of view is valid, it just isn't worth the stress of talking about it here. This isn't "you've managed to convince me", it's "I no longer care to be abused".
Possibly because the downvoters did not see yummyfajitas' posts as "condescending"; they just saw him pointing out facts that you find inconvenient.
(Note: I was not one of the downvoters; I don't have enough karma to downvote, but even if I did, I would not have downvoted your post. I didn't see yummyfajitas' posts as being condescending, but "condescending" is subjective, so I would have left it to yummyfajitas to respond if he felt so inclined.)
Yeah, I don't mind arguing with his claims - you essentially said similar things - but it really was the way that he said it; all I could come up with were angry responses and I felt like it wasn't worth continuing.
"what you call ... the rest of the world calls"; "You might be surprised to discover"; "people don't actually"; "In fact"; "typically"; "Strangely"; I think you get the idea. All of this made me feel terrible.
At the end of the day, I basically am not convinced that life is as good or better than subsistence farming for the people in question. I was under the strong impression it was worse now because they don't have enough food and so it's below subsistence level (especially without foreign aid), but like you said elsewhere, I guess we can't know for sure. Anyway, thanks for your time pdonis, it was kind of you to respond here.
What's condescending is your taking guesses at what's better for people and assuming they don't know what's better for themselves instead of just looking at their behavior.
If we're going to measure things in GDP, I believe that the disparity matters more than the hard numbers
Matters for what? For looking at absolute wealth, it doesn't matter at all. Africa's GDP now is higher by a factor of almost 4, according to that Wikipedia page, than it was in 1820. The fact that Europe's is higher by a much larger factor doesn't change that.
For analyzing root causes, yes, the disparity matters a lot: it tells you that the "first world" has done a much better job of making people richer. Which might lead one to think about what that huge increase in GDP is built on. Perhaps a desire to have something more than bare subsistence, combined with an understanding of the kind of economic, social, and cultural environment that's needed to make that happen?
There's another factor too: if you just have a plot of land that is able to provide food, water, clothing, and shelter for yourself without any actual registered trade you actually contribute nothing to the GDP.
And you are also at bare subsistence level. Yes, you are providing food, water, clothing, and shelter for yourself; but you are providing nothing else. If you're satisfied with having nothing but the bare amount of food, water, clothing, and shelter necessary to sustain your life, then I guess you'd be OK with that. But if that were the case, how would you be able to post here?
My understanding is that this self-sufficiency was basically destroyed by colonists.
No, it was changed by colonialism from bare self-sufficiency to the ability to export large quantities of food and raw materials. When colonialism ended, all the infrastructure needed to continue that level of productivity was still there. The post-colonial governments squandered it.
I have a hard time believing that for the percentage of the population living in "extreme poverty" (less than $1.25 per day - note that dollars and cents matter more when you don't have other ways to provide for yourself), things were as bad when they had their own land and were self-sufficient.
You and I can't make this judgment. Only the people themselves can. As yummyfajitas points out, many of them appear to be opting for modern conveniences over bare self-sufficiency. That indicates to me that if they were dropped into the same circumstances as their ancestors in 1820, they would not be pleased.
All this has made me realize it's just a pretty complex issue. I found this link at some point and I think it covers a lot of ground (3 pages). Although the perspective of these people is obviously biased, they are certainly quite well informed.
What I'm saying is that if you went to Africa in 1800 I don't believe you would see today's stereotypical child in rags with ribs sticking out of his chest and a swollen belly...
And if you go to Africa in 2012 you probably won't see this, although it was quite common worldwide in the 1800s. If you want to see this, you basically need to go to a war zone, the bush, or maybe Zimbabwe.
today's stereotypical child in rags with ribs sticking out of his chest and a swollen belly
As, for example, in England or Europe in the early 1800's. (I believe that by the early 1800's this was already somewhat less common in the USA, but that is largely due to the fact that the population of the early USA was almost entirely self-selected immigrants who came there determined to be self-sufficient, and because the USA was so sparsely settled.)
> I'm not sure if there was anybody living in extreme poverty in 1800.
There was no extreme poverty during the second half of the industrial revolution?
The Irish Great Famine never happened?
In the late 1800's, 16million people /didn't/ immigrate to America, because the jobs they had were better and paid more than the shit factory jobs we had?
Yet today over 1 billion people live in extreme poverty...
The right way to put that is "Yet today only a billion people live in extreme poverty." What we call "extreme poverty" today was the norm throughout the world until the 20th century.
> I think this is pretty naive or at the least, a simplistic way of viewing technology.
Bear-baiting is not coming back. If you don't know what it is, learning about it might upset you, which is my point.
Polio is confined to portions of the world instead of stalking the globe. Same with malaria. Smallpox is gone entirely.
Even more dramatic, there are places on the Earth now where people think it is a terrible, horrible tragedy if even a single child under three dies. Those people think it equally tragic if even a single mother dies in childbirth. Children in those regions are named before they're even born because it is expected as a matter of course that they will get to use those names!
It has been said that the past is a foreign country. Well, it is certainly inhabited by foreigners, people whose mindset was shaped by circumstances we shy from remembering. The mother of three children who gave birth eight times. The father of four children, the last of whom cost him his wife. Our minds are largely free of such horrors, and not inured to that kind of suffering. That is the progress of technology. That is what is improving the human race.
It is a long, long ladder, and sometimes we slip, but we've never actually fallen. That is our progress.
I guess I should couple "monotonic in goodness" with "taking a global perspective". Economically[0], the world hasn't had a down year for decades. Even the 1930s were an "up" decade, at least for the world.
[0] One can make an argument about "economic bads", because economic growth isn't necessarily an indicator of humanitarian progress. However, I've seen no data to indicate that the proportion of economic bads has increased, so it wouldn't have a differential effect that would nullify observed growth.
Locally speaking, there are horrible uses of technology that occur all the time, but people have been doing awful things to each other since there were humans, and I think it's hard to blame that on technology itself. So what I'm really saying is more restricted: that the march of technical progress has been, for the world, positive more than negative over almost any measurable timescale.
Economically, the world has seen down years within one decade, depending on what we're measuring. The somewhat-loose-yet-quantified world gross product, for example, is certainly an economic indicator and decreased in 2009.
Yes, the pleasures of life (wine, music, books, sex, spiritual experience) don't change all that much
I'm not so sure. Those pleasures all continue to exist but except for wine, the way we enjoy or practice most of these would be alien to people of 100 years ago. It's not the concepts that change but their expression.
Throw two 20-somethings from 1912 into a common modern scenario of doing shots before you go out, hitting a nightclub full of techno music, laser lights and people 'grinding', then coming home and indulging in some pre-maritial anal sex (just to be safe) and you might as well have thrown them on a different planet.
Life in 100 years will seem similarly bizarre and intense to us now. I think the author of the article has a certain notion of what 'cool' is but I think radical changes in expression and society are also 'cool' - they're just not jetpacks or spacesuits.
I think it's easy to overestimate the difference between people in the past and ourselves. The lack of shame with which people pursue their pleasures now may be different, but it's silly to think people 100 years ago didn't enjoy getting smashed and having sex.
After the double take/uneasy giggle at the choice of word to describe women (in the 1920s), I looked at the article.
One main difference that stands out for me is that the type of behaviour patterns described by the OP above (booze, grind, etc.) would be classed as "typical" from today's point of view, the "flapper" behaviour pattern above wouldn't have been "typical" in that usual sense of the word in those times (would it probably be tame from today's stand point?). Anecdotally, it would have been, at best fringe, and dare I say, restricted to (perhaps) the wealthy.
Someone also mentioned roman orgies. That would have been restricted to the wealthy, upper class too and would not have been classed as "typical"?
Therefore, the OP's point, namely, " the way we enjoy or practice most of these would be alien to people of 100 years ago. It's not the concepts that change but their expression." is relevant IMO.
And usually that is where clash of the generations originate from?
I think the issue is that when doing a comparison we are comparing todays common culture and our own experiences with the prevailing generalisations of the past.
Who knows in 50 to 100 years time how people will generalise our current culture and compare it to however people are then.
1912? Alcohol, party, anal sex... You could be talking about Rome and it would still be the same! You think it's different just because there's techno? Come on!
Throw two 20-somethings from 1912 into a common modern scenario of doing shots before you go out, hitting a nightclub full of techno music, laser lights and people 'grinding', then coming home and indulging in some pre-maritial anal sex (just to be safe) and you might as well have thrown them on a different planet.
This is not how modern twenty-somethings actually behave, except for blatantly stereotypical hipsters.
Agreed. What hubris to imagine modern 20-somethings invented alcohol, music and sex! In 1912 radio was being invented, Gibson was going strong making instruments, Picasso was shocking the world with disturbing art, women were upsetting men by wearing their clothes or dressing Oriental... and lots of sex was going on.
Well, yes. Taleb's point was that life's basic needs and pleasures don't change. My counter-point (which was in agreement with what you're saying) is that more people can enjoy those things, and there are more ways for them to do so.
Also, I don't think there's a time in history when alcohol/drug use and premarital anal sex weren't common. All of that is ancient. People tend to think of sexual norms in the 1837-1967 era (and even then, only middle-class and higher, and more in polite myth than actuality) as "traditional" but that's not how things "always" were.
The present -- the past's future -- is weird. You may not notice, because you're used to it, but some aspects of our world would certainly raise eyebrows in the not-far-distant past. America elected a black president in 2008; fifty years before, there were still racial segregation laws. The internet gives ubiquitous access to unprecedented amounts of information. Or, if that's too mundane, it also has vast amounts of nigh-uncensored pornography. The huge decades-long rise in crime in the US peaked around 1992 or so, and has been mysteriously plummeting ever since.
I think these examples would once have been widely regarded as weird, surprising, and non-superficial.
I failed to define "weird" well. By "weird", I meant, "unusual in ways that are separate-from-functional and persistent". The reason that I emphasize persistent is because fashions actually reach for the edgy and "weird", but fashion has a mean-reverting tendency over time.
For example, wearing a spacesuit in one's living room (unless the living room were in space) would be weird. That shit can't be comfortable.
America elected a black president in 2008
I don't find this to be "weird". Don't get me wrong: I'm very glad that it happened, and it came about decades before I believed it would.
What's "weird" to me is that, for four hundred years in this society, and millennia in many others, people were mistreated because of something as ridiculous and meaningless as skin color. It's almost astonishing to me that it took the world so long to collectively learn that this racist bullshit that dominated nearly every national culture for centuries was, in addition to being immoral, logically indefensible to the point of being insanity. Until World War 2 established racism to be a Very Bad Thing That Kills Millions, there were highly respected intellectuals in the US and UK who firmly believed white, Nordic people to be inherently superior.
Racism I would lump in with changing fashions, in that racial preferences evolve over time. Being Irish is now a prestigious heritage on the U.S. East Coast, and northeastern politicians have been known to "convert" to Irish Catholic culture. This was not the case for Irish people 175 years ago: we were reviled and seen as subhuman.
What I hope to see in the future is a world that is largely free of racism, and I don't find that weird. It seems to me that, if the world becomes more prosperous, the mindless and competitive impulses that allow racism to exist will dissipate. Nationalistic racism (which was far from limited to Germany, Italy, and Japan; just read "White Man's Burden") grew up in a time when the world was believed to be fundamentally zero-sum, and people had to invent pseudoscience to justify colonial robbery, and to galvanize their troops with an inflated sense of both their mission and their prospects.
A black president is not weird. Obama is also a great president, and would be an extremely strong contender for the job with any skin color. What's weird is the idea that a president being black even could be considered "weird", although you'd be absolutely right to point out that it has been considered such by most of America. I even remember hearing intelligent and not especially racist people saying ca. 2007 that this country "wasn't ready for a black president". Well, it was and is.
The internet gives ubiquitous access to unprecedented amounts of information.
I don't find that to be "weird", under the restricted definition of the word that I've been using, so much as a case of extreme prosperity. You're right that it's "surprising and non-superficial". If you think of technology in linear terms, you will always be shocked by what actually comes forth.
The huge decades-long rise in crime in the US peaked around 1992 or so, and has been mysteriously plummeting ever since.
I think that I could give a plausible explanation for that, although it would make this reply a lot longer. Actually, I would argue that there are several explanations. It's just hard to know which is the right one, hence the "mysterious" nature of it. It is a "small data" problem that you get any time you have a time series (because so many different kinds of events occur in time and are, sometimes accidentally, intercorrelated through time). When you're a historian, there are too many explanations that are plausible to tease out "the one".
As for the general weirdness, technological progress will accelerate, and post-scarcity society will be surprising, welcome, and (as you correctly pointed out) non-superficial. One might call that "weird". It just wouldn't match the much more limited definition of "weird" that I had in mind.
> The internet gives ubiquitous access to unprecedented amounts of information.
I believe that this, even if technically correct, is a huge understatement. The Internet short-circuited the feedback loop humanity as a whole had in creating and processing knowledge. Both the "sharing speed" and number of people involved in any topic had risen by several orders of magnitude. For the first time in history, humanity can solve problems as a whole, like a one big brain. I expect many more amazing things to come out of this just because the speed of information transfer risen so dramatically.
>> The huge decades-long rise in crime in the US peaked around 1992 or so, and has been mysteriously plummeting ever since.
> I think that I could give a plausible explanation for that, although it would make this reply a lot longer. Actually, I would argue that there are several explanations.
Just to underline that this is a really interesting topic: Freakonomics[0] guys believe that one of the main causes is the legalization of abortion in the United States[1]. They made some convincing arguments for that, and it's one of the most reasonable (if controversial) theory I have heard so far.
I personally like the lead paint correlation more, because it appeals to me to think that the only reason things were so bad for so long was because everyone was brain-damaged.
>People tend to compare the experiences of average people now against those of an elite in the past and conclude that things were better.
This, I think, is key. I mean, notice all the old guys whining about how the '60s and '70s were so much better... notice how it's mostly white men saying that? that's 'cause, well, yeah, it was better for white men back then. I am not trying to say that 'white privilege' doesn't exist or anything, but it's no longer absolute. I've probably worked for as many asians as white folks, and I've even worked for a few women.
Hell, half the studies on stagnating wages since the '70s talk about 'wages for working men[1]' and then go on to complain that unemployment levels for men are also way higher; and they are right, but they are missing the point, that men now have to compete with people we didn't have to compete with before. So yeah, we've got to try a little harder than we did then.
I mean, the point is that things have gotten dramatically better for people that are not white and male; I'd say things have probably gotten better overall (though, that's pretty subjective; I might feel different if I was one of those now unemployable white men.)
I've read your comment, and a follow-on comment to someone else, and I think understand now.
You're saying that the future will be cool, but your disagreement with him is more in the definition of the word cool than with his point. When he says cool, he means what you're calling weird. This is all semantics, more or less. (Right?)
Another point you make is that Taleb misses the important fact that in the future (hopefully) a far greater number of people will get to enjoy these pleasures. I think this is important, and the biggest weakness with the article. Taleb seems to argue from the perspective that either a) there's no substantive cultural or societal difference between the West and East or b), the West will continue to be dominant. But in reality, the future may look radically different from today, not because of technology, but because a different (and much larger, of course) group of people will be using and furthering the technology.
Three millennia ago, wine existed but the vast majority of people never got to drink any.
Nitpicking, I know, but it's really quite the opposite. Three millenia ago, wine existed, but it wasn't always very good wine. However, if you lived in a region where you could grow wine-grapes (or wine-grade rice, plums, whatever your culture used for alcohol), you almost definitely did.
Yes, the pleasures of life (wine, music, books, sex, spiritual experience) don't change all that much and therefore we use a lot of old technologies in daily life, so it can appear like there's nothing new... but there will be more people able to afford them, and they will be much less impeded by the stupid shit that clogged up peoples' lives in pre-technological times. Just to continue Taleb's example: in the 21st century, a lot of people get to drink wine of (by historical standards) exceedingly high quality. Three millennia ago, wine existed but the vast majority of people never got to drink any.
Many of the modern applications that have managed to survive today came to disrupt the deleterious effect of the philistinism of modernity, particularly the 20th century: the large multinational bureaucratic corporation with “empty suits” at the top; the isolated family (nuclear) in a one-way relationship with the television set, even more isolated thanks to car-designed suburban society [...]
I'm going to stop there with the quote. His point is valid, but I think there's something missed when people rip on suburbia. Yes, it's outmoded and wasteful and somewhat ugly, but the Levittowns were a lot better than the "company towns" of early-industrial hell, and those were a lot better than being a serf on a medieval enclosure, in a time when it wasn't uncommon for a peasant to have his head cut off by a knight (knights were more like warlords than the noble paladins of romance). People tend to compare the experiences of average people now against those of an elite in the past and conclude that things were better, but that's not fair. The 1800-era analogue of a bored suburbanite of 50th-percentile social status (only one car!) was not an English baron, but someone who started work at seven in the coal mines.
People rip on suburbia now because it's outmoded, but it wasn't always this way. Urban freeways are called "parkways" because the vision of Robert Moses (in hindsight we say, "That fucker!", but he was very respected in his time) was for them to be park-like roads for an automotive elite. In the 1920s, suburbia was very much in. The suburban lifestyle, with lots of driving, was designed for the rich and handed down, over a couple of decades, to the working classes in a watered-down form. The result now, almost a century later, is that "suburbia" is no longer cool because the low-quality suburbs of the poor have killed the image of the concept.
Oddly enough, has anyone ever noticed how rich people suburbs aren't called that? The Hamptons isn't "suburbia". The Woodbury towns out there are "charming little towns" rather than suburbs, because the rich people who live there have enough time to make zoning rules that keep a quaint little street or two alive. These people aren't morally superior for having houses in high-price towns that still have walkable main streets as opposed to "suburbs". They're just richer.
One thing I find interesting is that Ted Kaczynski (Unabomber) wrote an essay about technology and alienation, while most of his complaints were of the industrial-era society, not the technological society we evolved into. He was miserable because, in spite of his extreme intelligence and adept writing, he had no real influence in a world run by corrupt corporate institutions. So he went out and killed people in order to effectively force the New York Times to publish his rant. If he had waited 15 years and not killed people, he would have had the public access and attention he craved. He might have trolled a bit, but no one would have died. Technology was just about to solve many of the problems that had him so upset-- that he blamed on industrial society.
My view of technology and progress is that it's nearly monotonic in "goodness", but that the old humanity we're now trying to distance ourselves from is quite tenacious and willing to use technology toward pre-technological purposes, and so the long-term convergence toward democracy that we'd like to see doesn't come nearly as fast as we'd like. For example, one might like to believe that, in an electronic world, old-style industrial pressures like taking orders from managers, showing up in an uninspiring white-box office during certain hours, and writing TPS reports would vanish... but human nature is a certain way and power likes to maintain position, so the transition is actually taking decades rather than the hours that it "should". The result of this is that the technological push toward a better world appears to collapse into an unsatisfying half measure and people end up having to use technology in uninspiring ways (e.g. getting to write code, but still having to take orders from non-technical executives or "product managers"). That's not technology's fault. That's an artifact of humans being slow to improve themselves.